Jun 262022
 

Prior to Challenger, one piece of technology that was often touted as something that would be deployed by the Space Shuttle was the “beam builder.” This was a mechanism that would take rolls of aluminum “tape” a millimeter or less in thickness and automatically chop, bend, deploy and weld said aluminum into truss structure beams. These beams would be arbitrarily long… useful for building all manner of things, from space stations to radar satellites, on up to solar power satellites. The technology got fairly far along… but once Challenger exploded, the idea of actually using the shuttle to build vast constructs in space kinda vanished, with ISS being the only example of that. And in the case of ISS, very little actual “construction” was carried out, instead the ISS was simply assembled, with parts like the solar panels deploying rather than being built.

But while it lasted, beam builders featured in a lot of concept art, such as the one below depicting a beam being extruded from the Beam Builder in the rear of the Shuttle cargo bay. Irritatingly, I’ve misplaced the book I scanned this from and cannot immediately confirm who to credit it to.

 Posted by at 9:16 pm
Jun 262022
 

Is it illegal? It’s certainly fraudulent. And it’s something to watch out for.

Never mind the “let’s bring in cartel money” aspect, which I’m *really* certain is illegal.

Additionally: she is a special kind of stupid for discussing this on a phone call to an inmate, when it is open knowledge that such calls are recorded. On the other hand, she’s a Democrat, so her chances of being reported on by the media, never mind arrested, are minimal.

 Posted by at 8:41 pm
Jun 262022
 

In 1964, the US government dumped around a  quarter million M-1 carbine “assault weapons” onto the US market, complete with 15 or 30 round magazines. They were available to anyone who wanted one, no background checks needed, no waiting period; they cost less than $100 for most people, or $20 if you were an NRA member. And what happened? Mass shootings, schools blown to bits, synagogues reduced to bullet sponges? Nope.

 

Stephen Hunter: The Assault Weapon Massacres of 1964

Access to “weapons of war” was a lot easier then than now. Access to madness is easier now than then.

 Posted by at 6:27 pm
Jun 262022
 

So last night I went to bed after several hours of both of my blogs looking pretty badly screwed up by n SQL injection attack, and with tech support closed for the night (after having been 24/7 operations for the past twenty-something years… thanks, Covid!). Set my alarm to wake me up to have a doubtless hours-long phone call with tech support… and here we are, both blogs seem returned to normal. Huh.

Anyway, I don’t take *nearly* as many photos these days as I did when I lived in Utah. This place simply doesn’t compare on the natural beauty front. Still, every now and then there’s something that seems worth pointing the phone at, if not grabbing the actual camera.

 Posted by at 8:35 am
Jun 252022
 

Part of the back story to my Zaneverse stories set 500 years in the future is that the 21st century turned out to be the most nightmarish century in human history. The Pan Asian Wars wipe out about half the planetary population and trash the rest of the worlds biosphere via pollution and radiation and plagues. Subsequent to that is the European Diaspora as tens of millions of indigenous Europeans flee the continent as it transforms into a third world hellhole, dominated by the Caliphate, feeding into the resurgence of Iceland and the rise of the Texas Semi Autonomous Region. All this is far in the past of the main characters, but it helped establish the world they live in just as the colonization of the New World starting five hundred years ago established *our* world.

This was all supposed to be *decades* in the future, time enough for civilized society to get set up on the Moon, Mars, asteroids, habitats, leading to *some* portion of humanity surviving The Fall at the end of the world at the beginning of the 22nd century. I fear I was too optimistic.

 

 Posted by at 1:32 am
Jun 242022
 

A Russian surface to air missile recently failed rather spectacularly, turning around quickly in flight and seemingly tried to go home.

This sort of thing is not terribly unusual. Here’s a Saudi Patriot missile taking a detour:

 Posted by at 9:19 pm
Jun 242022
 

… or is this pair of signs kinda contradictory?

The top sign says that there is two hour parking for the entire block from 7AM to 5 PM. But the bottom sign says that parking is only 15 minutes, from11AM to 10 PM. These two overlap from 11AM to 5PM. Which one has precedence during that time?

 

 Posted by at 7:34 pm
Jun 242022
 

Not *this* blog, but the APR blog:

https://www.aerospaceprojectsreview.com/blog/

I’ve been getting bombarded with messages from the security programs all day telling me that there is an ongoing attack on the blog, such as:

June 24, 2022 11:56pm 194.xxx (Russian Federation) Blocked for SQL Injection in User-Agent String

I’m fuzzy on what exactly that means exactly, and the software says it’s blocking it, but all the attacks seem to be coming from Russia. So if the APR blog goes weird, or vanishes… this is why.

 Posted by at 7:30 pm